Things I'll Miss About World's Toughest Mudder

After two years of participating in the World’s Toughest Mudder, I’m skipping it this year. My brain says it’s the right decision to make. It was never supposed to be an every-year thing. And it’s expensive. My brain tells me I have a mortgage, a wife and kids, responsibilities that come first. My brain also tells me I have a busted leg. I limp painfully walking through the grocery store. After trying to fix it myself for a month, today I made a doctor’s appointment. My brain says there’s NO WAY I could or should do World’s Toughest Mudder this year. And my brain is right.

But my heart . . . My heart is stubborn and illogical. My heart would give anything to be there this year, to see how far I could push it. My heart is a pain in the ass. And it tortures my brain.

I know there’s so many things I’m going to miss about World’s Toughest Mudder this year. For therapy’s sake, here’s a few of them:

PAK'S OCR ADVICE

Two-time World's Toughest Mudder champ Junyong Pak recently made a few videos with Coach Up giving viewers tips on how to tackle common obstacles such as the rope cross, barbed wire crawl and rope climb. Check them out here:

The Struggle to Define "Success" (A Recap of the 2013 World's Toughest Mudder)

It's hard to measure success when that line is constantly shifting.

Shortly after my first obstacle race in 2010 -- a Warrior Dash at a ski resort in New York, where I felt like I was going to die after making the mistake of sprinting the beginning and gassing out -- a friend said I should do something called a Tough Mudder in Vermont. I laughed and dismissed it. I was approaching 39, and even in my best days, there was no way I could have ever run a 10-mile race, never mind full of obstacles on a mountain.

But when friends said they were signing up for it, I figured if they could do it, I could. The idea of a Tough Mudder scared the hell out of me, and, fueled by fear, I trained my ass off. I came in a little over three hours, but I walked away with a nagging feeling that I could do better. I resolved to return the next year with new goals -- to qualify for World's Toughest Mudder (at the time, you had to qualify for WTM by being in the Top 5 percent of finishers) and to complete the Mount Snow, Vermont course twice in one day.

Tao of Obstacle Racing

In the week leading up to the 24-hour 2013 World's Toughest Mudder, I remembered the quote above from Bruce Lee: "Be like water." It resonated. With just days to go before the race, Tough Mudder announced fairly dramatic changes to the course -- the 2013 version of WTM would feature a 5-mile course instead of the previous 10-mile course. It also wouldn't feature long, cold swims as an obstacle; competitors had a chance to stay "relatively dry," provided they completed each obstacle perfectly.

These changes caused strong reactions on messageboards. Many complained, saying the course would resemble a Warrior Dash, that the 5-mile course would make it easier. Others wondered how the focus on making the race obstacle-heavy would play out. I thought of Lee's quote.